


De-Generation

by cereal, gallifreyburning



Series: fic tennis [1]
Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Doctor Who AU, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-28
Updated: 2013-11-27
Packaged: 2018-01-02 20:47:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 17,381
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1061457
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cereal/pseuds/cereal, https://archiveofourown.org/users/gallifreyburning/pseuds/gallifreyburning
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In Pete's Universe, Rose Tyler finds out that the Doctor is the same man he used to be. The same man he used to be, several lifetimes ago, actually.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

[allrightfine](http://allrightfine.tumblr.com/):

The Doctor, of course, thinks the entire thing is hilarious.

“It’s a cow-tastrophe, Rose! A cow-lossal cow-tastrophe!”

Standing in the middle of a dusty road in rural Montana, surrounded by cows, Rose is having a decidedly more difficult time seeing the humor.

“This was supposed to be a quick job, Doctor,” she sighs, and steps over another freshly-given gift from their new cow friends. “Tech retrieval, in and out, and on our way to some California sun.”

The Doctor holds the tech in the air, grinning, “Well, we got it, didn’t we?”

He’s been alternating between mooing at the cows, trying to help their farmer wrangle them up, and fiddling with the gadget they’d come to retrieve. 

It looks a bit like a wand, a video game remote maybe, and every time he presses a button, the remote beeps louder, almost like it’s building to something.

“Of course we got it,” she says, plucking the wand from his hands and turning it over a few times. “That’s what we do. But it’s not dead,” she points at the the row of lights blinking across the middle. “We’re going to have to take it back right now — so much for the beach.”

The Doctor snatches the remote again, giggling as he points it at cluster of cows, pretending to zap them, “Aw, it’ll be fine! Call it  _bovine intervention_.”

She rolls her eyes, but can’t stop the smile that spreads across her face. Why would she possibly have thought this was going to be easy? As soon as they’d located the remote, buried deep under the farm, it should’ve struck her — they were going to cause a stampede and, being the sort of people they are, they were going to volunteer to help round the animals back up.

There’s actually only a handful left now, and they’re slowly getting them closer to the fenced-in areas of the farm, but she’s hot and sweaty, and she’s already had to make six different calls to get their travel arrangements resorted.

Back to dreary old London, coats and jumpers, instead of the sea and the sun and the bikini she’d bought special for the trip.

With a sigh, she moves back to the nearest cow, pushing uselessly at the animal, as the Doctor jumps around, still holding the remote, pressing buttons and twirling it like a baton.

Neither of them think anything of the final, loud beep it gives off, until they’re on the zeppelin back home.

“Doctor,” she says, fingers fishing for the straw in her drink, as the flight attendant and the beverage cart continue down the aisle. “What’s wrong with your hair?”

[gallifreyburning](http://gallifreyburning.tumblr.com/):

He’s half-asleep in the seat next to her, head tipping toward the curved outer shell of the zeppelin. He mutters something incoherent, Rose thinks she hears the phrase “reverse the polarity of the super-hold gel,” and then flops his head back against the headrest and lets out a snore.

He’s been in this groggy half-sleep since they got airborne; apparently playing cowboy is the precise thing to tucker a Doctor out.

Leaning closer, she reaches up to brush the shaggy brown locks off the top of his ear – the crooked one, with the tiny fold, the one he likes her to nibble on when she’s whispering filthy things into it. It’s past time for him to have his hair cut; maybe if she says something about letting Jackie have a crack at his hair, he’ll run right into the arms of the nearest barber.

Nearly eight months in, and he’s still fairly baffled at his new half-human hair follicles. His fifth day in this universe, he’d spent an entire afternoon in a near-catatonic trance on the living room sofa, Rose’s little hand mirror beside him, surfacing from his meditation only to occasionally stare at his reflection, inspecting his stubbled cheeks and frowning worriedly. He wouldn’t tell her what he was doing, but the next day he’d nicked himself four times shaving with a razor. Then he made a failed attempt to build a sonic electric shaver, and spent a full day in a fit of sulking that finally ended with him telling her the secret of Time Lord hair: he’d always had conscious control over its growth. On top of his head, on his face, his chest, the backs of his manly hairy hands, he’d always been able to regulate the speed and thickness of its growth – he’d never had to bother with shaving and haircuts before, unless the whim struck him. And on those occasions when he’d burnt his hair or eyebrows off in the odd explosion or two, all he had to do was concentrate for a few hours, and everything would be back to normal, follically speaking.

But now, his hair follicles apparently fall into the extensive category of“human bits that the Doctor can’t entirely control,”a list that includes bits that Rose has come to appreciate quite thoroughly. 

With a smile, Rose puts down her drink and slips out of her seat, headed for the lavatory.

She’s just washing her hands when she hears the muffled sounds of panic in the zeppelin; a shout of pain, followed by the vibration of footsteps pounding down the aisle.

She’s out the door, hands dripping, hoping that nothing’s gone wrong with the alien tech in the bag they stored in the overhead bin, the one the Doctor had assured dirigiport security was a portable music storage prototype, and had even found a way to plug earbuds into for the sake of proving his point.

The commotion is near Rose and the Doctor’s seats, a small crowd has gathered around even as the stewards attempt to push their way through. There’s another shout, a shriek from the people obscuring Rose’s view, and someone says the word  _seizure._

Panic grips the base of Rose’s spine, squeezes, sends a cold shot of fear straight up to the base of her skull. She sprints the short distance down the aisle, to where one of the stewards is leaning over her empty aisle seat.

“Get out of the way, _out of the way_!” she pants, shoving fellow passengers aside roughly.

In the Doctor’s seat is a stranger in the throes of some kind of fit, his back arched and eyes rolled up into his head as he makes pained choking noises, fingers scrabbling at the armrests and feet erratically pounding the seat in front of him. His porcelain skin is covered in a sheen of sweat, his long-ish curly auburn hair plastered against his head.

“Get to the PA and ask if there’s a doctor onboard,” one steward says to another, and the second bolts past Rose in a rush of air. 

Rose is far less worried about why this stranger is in the Doctor’s seat than she is about getting him some help. Her gaze darts around the cabin, because the Doctor ought to be here, he would know what to do. She has field medic training, can stitch a wound in a pinch, but aside from putting a stick in this man’s mouth to keep him from biting his own tongue off, she hasn’t a clue what to do in this case.

Another strangled cry breaks from the man’s throat, his back arching as though he’s trying to crawl right out of his skin. 

It dawns on Rose, then: this stranger is wearing the Doctor’s clothes.

[allrightfine](http://allrightfine.tumblr.com/):

The realization is quickly lost as the man’s eyes snap open wide, locking right on Rose’s as he begins repeating her name.

“Rose, Rose, Rose, Rose,” over and over, and though the voice sounds frightened and desperate, Rose recognizes the cadence, the pattern of it. It’s the Doctor in Tesco trying not to forget milk, a single-minded verbal repetition — _milk milk milk milk_ — that seems to help him remember when his mind gets distracted.

“Rose, Rose, Rose, Rose, Rose,” he’s still going, the words slowing, quieting, as his body relaxes back into the seat. His eyes slip shut, breaking the stare, and his breathing evens out. Is he — is he  _sleeping_?

There’s a noise further down the aisle as a man shoulders toward them, “Coming through, coming through, I’m a nurse!”

Rose is lost, trying to process everything, all the events of the day swimming in her mind, assembling and disassembling, trying to find an explanation as to why this man knows her name.

The nurse makes his way to in front of the man in the Doctor’s seat, checking his pulse, shining a light in his eyes, an efficient once-over that Rose can tell isn’t leading to any revelations.

“He appears to be fine,” the nurse tells Rose. “Sleeping it off now. You’ll need to keep an eye on him until we land. Is your husband prone to seizures?”

The words are automatic, “He’s not my husband.”

The nurse sighs, “Fine, your boyfriend, then. Is your  _boyfriend_ prone to seizures?”

Rose turns to look at the man in the seat again, the one that’s now got his eyes back open and is shaking his head slowly, a finger raised to his lips in a quieting gesture.

“Um, no?”

“Well, you’ll still need him checked,” the nurse says, and turns to push through the crowd again. Rose watches as it dissipates, passengers returning to their seats.

“Thank you,” Rose calls, still completely bewildered as a flight attendant rushes down the cleared aisle.

“I’ve notified the ground crews,” she tells Rose. “They’ll be ready to check your husband — your  _boyfriend_ — when we land.”

Then, even she is gone, returning to the cabin at the front as Rose stares at the empty seat beside the man.

Where is the Doctor in all of this? So much noise and commotion, all his favorite things, and he’s nowhere to be found.

In a series of slightly stilted movements, she slips into the seat next him, watching him warily as his head lolls back against the window of the zeppelin.

“My hus —” damn it, every time, maybe they should just get married to make the labeling part easier. “The man sitting in that seat will be back soon.”

It feels rude though, telling a stranger who’s just had a seizure that he’s going to need to move, and she rushes to correct herself.

“I mean, he can just sit in your seat,” Rose says. “If you want to stay here.”

The man’s head tips from the window, angling toward Rose, still a little unsteady and tired, “This is my seat,” he says, and he stops abruptly, shoulders straightening as he repeats the sentence, “This  _is_ my seat. This is my  _seat_ ,” his voice is going up and down on the words like he’s testing it out, the things he can do with it.

“Wait a minute,” he says, pointing a finger at Rose before curling it back toward himself and inspecting his hands. “I  _know_ these hands. I’ve  _had_ these hands.”

His eyes widen and flicker down the length of his body. The Doctor’s clothes fit this bloke in width, but in length he’s drowning — the cuffs of his shirt are swamping the man’s hands, the legs of his jeans, when Rose casts a glance to check, are pooled on top of his Chucks.

Whoever he is, he’s definitely shorter than the Doctor.

The man’s hands are frantically patting at his body, fingertips flying up to pull at his hair, “Rose, do you have a mirror? I need a mirror.”

Reflexively, she reaches for her bag under the seat, removing a compact hand mirror that the man plucks from her fingers and opens.

She’s just about to ask — finally — why this bloke knows her name when he gets a look at himself and lets out a frustrated noise.

“This was two bodies ago!”

[gallifreyburning](http://gallifreyburning.tumblr.com/):

~~~~~

The Doctor’s climbed past Rose into the aisle before he can process anything else, before his still-very-enormous-mostly-Time Lord brain is finished calculating all the ramifications of the events of the last five minutes. His skin’s still stinging, his bones aching from the marrow out, his muscles still compulsively flexing and contracting so he stumbles halfway to the lavatory, and ends up in a middle-aged woman’s lap.

He’s murmuring apologies in a voice of the same pitch he’s used to, but in smoother and more rounded vowels (“My apologies, madam,” comes off of this tongue instead of “Sorry, I’m so sorry”). He’s using arms that are too short to extract himself from the woman’s grip and ends up fumbling (she has so many hands, humans aren’t supposed to have so many hands, she grins at him and replies, “Ooh, it’s all right dearie,” as her fingers find his bum, pushing and pinching at the same time until he’s on his feet again).

He has to get to the lavatory, because his stomach’s roiling. He’d stuffed it full of chips, cheap ones from the fast food place at the dirigiport before they left, and every single one of those chips is about to come back up.

This doesn’t feel like regeneration, there isn’t manic energy bursting from his every cell. It feels like he’s been compacted and then dragged along behind a horse for a few miles (he’s been in that situation more than once, he knows what he’s talking about – is he talking? Aloud? The steward in the tiny galley in front of the first class cabin is staring at him like he’s a nutter.

He’s probably talking aloud.)

Flashing the steward a tight smile, an everything’s-just-fine, we’re-all-fine-here smile, he ducks into the lavatory. Closes the door and latches it just in time to get all those chips into the toilet.

His hearts are pounding (hearts? No, just one on the left, he had that problem once before in this body, if he remembers correctly), and when he lifts his head, leaning heavily on the tiny metal counter, he finds bright blue eyes staring back at him. He’s wearing a straighter nose and fuller jaw than he’d had on this morning, along with a mop of curly chestnut hair, just around ear-length. A more melancholy brow, a deeper-set mouth.

This is, without a shadow of a doubt, Doctor version 8.0.

He’s staring at himself without looking, performing a mental check, verifying that all the important information is still inside his head – Rose Tyler, metacrisis, alternative universe, Montana cows and blinky alien remote gadgets, doing Pete and Torchwood a favor. He recalls everything with crystal clarity, from the combination to Koschei’s bunk locker at the Prydonian Academy to the shag he’d had with Rose this morning in the motel.

 _Well that’s something, at least._ The Doctor can’t begin to count the number of times this eighth body had amnesia, it was a particular weakness in that set of neurons, almost like the weakness in the dorsal tubercle of his tenth body, the one that meant Pete Tyler would always win the round of golf they played on the second Tuesday of each month.

The Doctor pulls a few paper towels from the dispenser and is wiping his face and mouth when there’s a timid knock on the door beside him.

“Are you all right in there?”

Rose.

_Rose._

She’d been staring at him like he’d grown a second head, and no wonder – he practically had.

“Give me just a moment, please,” he says, and the voice in his own ears is completely familiar and completely disconcerting, like hearing an echo from years ago. Cramming the paper towels into the bin, he sets about rolling up his sleeves and the hem of his jeans, until they aren’t dangling anymore, before opening the door.

[allrightfine](http://allrightfine.tumblr.com/):

Rose is standing in front of it, arms dangling, palms out — it’s a neutral position, one meant not to seem threatening. They’d taken a seminar just last month on body language back at Torchwood, a completely voluntary course they’d done just for a bit of laugh, and when he thinks back on it now, the body language she’d demonstrated when they’d gotten home, the memory makes him blush.

“You’ll have to excuse me,” he tells her, still standing safely, if not a little cramped, inside the lavatory, “I seem to have, well, I seem to have switched bodies.”

Rose, to her eternal credit, doesn’t lash out. Doesn’t do much of anything, really, except go completely and utterly pale, mouth opening and closing a few times before she speaks.

“With who — with  _whom_? Whose body is this? What are you talking about?” He can tell she’s grappling with the situation, switching back and forth between the person she is at work, and the person she is at home with him.

He glances at the other passengers, the ones in the rows near the lavatory, the ones presently staring at them.

“Shall we go back to our seats?” He tries to direct her attention to the curious looks they’re receiving, darting his eyes between them as he steps back out into the aisle.

Rose doesn’t move though, not a single step back, stuck between complete bewilderment and — is that  _anger_? Oh, no, no, that just won’t do. She can’t be  _angry_ with him.

“Please, Rose,” he says quietly. “Rose Marion Tyler. Dame Rose. Jackie’s daughter.” He drops his voice even lower and looks pointedly at her, “Former resident of an entirely different universe.”

Her eyes widen and she’s backpedaling up the aisle, head turning sharply to make sure he follows. There are only a handful of people privy to that information and he can feel the confusion rolling off of her in waves.

She takes an extra step beyond their seats, allowing him to slide into the one nearest the window, his entire body still feeling sluggish and ill-fitting. Once he’s seated, she settles herself next to him, gaze never leaving his.

“Explain yourself,” she says. “You know where the Doctor is, don’t you?” She gestures at his clothes, as if they’re some sort of clue.

“Of course I know where the Doctor is, Rose,” he likes that with this mouth, he decides suddenly, the way her name fits, gliding over his tongue. “He’s right here.” He gestures at himself, the ridiculous outfit he’s wearing.

“No,” she says slowly, voice tight. “He’s not.”

He turns to face her more fully, and there’s an impulse he can’t rectify to grab her hands. It seems natural, only not quite with these limbs, not with this skin, and instead he folds his hands in his lap.

“I do hate to be contrary,” he says. “Well, not  _needlessly_ anyway, but the Doctor  _is_ right here. I’m him, only I seem to have — not regenerated, but, perhaps, _de_ -generated? This is my eighth body. The one before the one with — shall we say — astute hearing? The one before  _run_ , Rose Tyler.”

Rose’s brow furrows, lips twisting, and he watches as she tries to slot the puzzle pieces into place. She looks him over and then glances up at the overhead bins, the ones that contain that tiny little gadget that he’s sure now, as he’s thinking it over, is responsible for all this.

Before he can speak again, she’s raising her hand, giving him a solid swat across the bicep, “Had to press the buttons! Had to  _fiddle_!”

He grins, “Of course! Who doesn’t love a good fiddle every now and again? Fiddle players, too, generally an interesting bunch, I’ve always found —”

Oh, oh, she’s glaring at him, hardly the time for levity yet, then.

Other passengers have begun looking at them once more, as Rose’s voice had risen, and he smiles diplomatically at each one of them in turn.

“Can you change back?” She asks, the words ground out between her teeth as she, too, tries to force a smile for the sake of their company.

“I should think so,” he says, “Well, I should like to think so. I’m not quite sure exactly. May be a simple de-aging, in which case it should right itself soon enough, or it may be —”

She cuts him off, “It may be what?”

He shrugs and the movement feels foreign, his muscles still tight and burning, “May be something else entirely.”

Rose squints at him and then back at the other passengers, “Am I the only one that can see it?”

It’s not very polite, but he laughs, “No, why would you think that?”

She shakes her head, hand sweeping in a gesture clearly meant to encompass the rest of the zeppelin, “Oh, I don’t know, maybe because an entirely different man boarded this flight, than the one sitting here now?”

Always so astute, Rose, he can see why he likes her, but it’s really much more simple than that. “Haven’t you found, that when something doesn’t make sense, people prefer to dismiss it? They can’t comprehend that a person has changed right before their very eyes, so they’re ignoring it.”

Rose shifts to look at the other passengers, the way they’ve already gone back to their own business, magazines and books, quiet conversation, not a single one left paying them any mind.

“And anyway,” he tries again, “I’m not an  _entirely_ different man — still the Doctor, you know.”

[gallifreyburning](http://gallifreyburning.tumblr.com/):

~~~~~

Rose narrows her eyes at this bloke – the Doctor, still the Doctor, he says – and digs her fingernails into the palm of each hand, willing herself to wake up. He’s staring at her with those bright blue eyes that remind her so much of the Doctor she first met, the one with short-cropped hair and a Northern accent, except those blue eyes are staring at her from an entirely unfamiliar face.

This isn’t her first time coping with the Doctor and his propensity for switching bodies, of course. But since he stood on that beach and said the words, “I won’t regenerate” and “one life,” she’d let herself relax into the idea that she was going to grow old with the tall, skinny bloke with expressive brown eyes and a head of fantastic hair.

And now there’s a new – well, new-old – bloke sitting beside her, and in the back of her mind she’s re-playing two separate moments in the console room of the TARDIS, “Are you slitheen?” and “You’re still you?”

“We have to get to the labs at Torchwood, as soon as we land I’ll call Pete. Do you think you can dissect _that_ ” – her eyes flicker upward toward the overhead storage and the alien remote – “and figure out how to fix _this_?” – she waves in his general direction.

His eyes widen, brow drawing down in mild disbelief. “I’ll have you know, I got many compliments on my appearance in this incarnation. Catherine the Great asked me to dance _six times_ at the celebration of her wedding to Peter III. He was so jealous he had the guard haul me off the palace grounds. The Grand Duke of Morovella made an entire sculpture garden devoted to my likeness; he was keen on my nose, you see. Morovellians don’t have noses, just these sort of snouts that end in a –”

She reaches up and puts a hand over his mouth. The words flowing from him stop suddenly, and it strikes her how different these lips feel against her fingers than the ones she’s used to. She doesn’t know if the same thought has struck him, if perhaps her touch feels different to his new-old nerve endings or not, but she snatches her hand away as her cheeks start to warm up.

“I’m sure the statues of you would’ve given Michelangelo’s David a run for its money,” she whispers, “I’m more concerned about trying to explain to everyone we know that you’re the Doctor instead of some random bloke I picked up in the States.”

“Oh, I see. That is rather a bit of trouble, isn’t it?” He bites his lip thoughtfully – it’s an entirely unfamiliar gesture, something the ninth and tenth bodies of his never made a habit of, but she finds she can’t look away. The color drains from his face. “Your mum isn’t picking us up from the dirigiport, is she?”

“No,” Rose replies.

He lets out a breath and his shoulders sag a little in relief. “That’s all right, then. Everything has a way of sorting itself out, Rose. I wouldn’t worry about it.”

The PA crackles, and the captain’s voice comes through the little speaker above them: “Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve begun our descent into London Heathwick, please prepare for arrival.”

[allrightfine](http://allrightfine.tumblr.com/):

Rose buckles her seatbelt, watching as the Doctor does the same, the movement altogether far more graceful than anything she’s ever seen from the Doctor before.

It’s somehow more elegant, more fluid, and she’s transfixed by his fingers and the simple action of inserting a tab into a slot.

“Do you expect it to be a bumpy ride?” He asks, conversationally, and she shakes her head.

“Way too soon to tell,” she says.

~~~~~

The entire process of boarding and de-boarding aircraft is always completely inefficient, in every corner of the galaxy, and there’s no exception now, as the crowd bottlenecks through the exit into the dirigiport.

He takes the time to test out his body, there’s not much more room here than on the zeppelin, but it’s enough to get a better feel for things.

His shoes are approximately two and a half sizes too big, his toes just reaching the area where the white, rubber caps on the tips begin. His outfit has been addressed, as best it can be, and he’ll be grateful to get back to their flat and change into something more comfortable.

Only — well, that is a problem, isn’t it? All his clothes are meant to fit a taller body. Such a messy business, every time, this switching bodies, and now without even his ship at his disposal.

They’ll have to go shopping, that’s the only thing for it. He has no clear idea on how much time he’ll spend like this, but he’s hardly going to endure it looking like some failing independent musician.

He’s mentally cataloging all the places to get a proper, tailored outfit in this time period when the crowd finally dissipates. Rose grabs his hand and begins to pull him along, but the feel of it brings them both up short.

“Sorry,” she mumbles, unwrapping her fingers from his as they make their way out of the gate.

He doesn’t like that, Rose apologizing, and he rushes to fix it, grasping at her hand again in a swift, reflexive movement.

“Hardly anything to be apologizing over,” he tells her. “This,” he holds up their joined hands, “Is clearly the most efficient way to prevent being separated.”

She casts him a skeptical look, or, at least, that’s how he interprets it.

“Right, yes,  _efficient_ ,” she says and raises her free hand in the direction of Pete Tyler, who’s standing just beyond security looking baffled.

They join him quickly, following along as he ushers them out a side door.

“What are you doing here?” Rose asks as they leave the building, a black Torchwood-issue sedan parked on the service road.

“Got a call about some incident on the flight,” Pete says. “Thought it might be you two. You and the Doctor, I mean.”

Pete’s eyes are darting around, presumably searching for the Doctor as he knows him, and shooting discrete glances at the way Rose’s hand is apparently joined with a stranger’s.

Well, best dive right in.

The Doctor unclasps his fingers from Rose’s and shoulders his bag off, handing it to Pete.

“The tech’s in there,” the Doctor says. “I’ll need a look at it though.”

Pete nods automatically, but then shakes his head instead, as if he’s trying to clear it.

“I’m sorry,” Pete says. “And you are — ?”

[gallifreyburning](http://gallifreyburning.tumblr.com/):

“I’m only wearing the wrong face, you’ll get used to it,” the Doctor says. He snatches the keys from Pete’s hands. “And I’ll drive, if you don’t mind.”

“This is the Doctor,” Rose says at the same time. He could be imagining things, but it feels like she squeezes his hand. When he squeezes back, she shoots him a surprised look.

He’s definitely imagining things, then.

He hops into the driver’s seat of the Torchwood car, and takes a second to adjust the steering wheel lower and the seat closer to the front while Rose and Pete both hover just outside the car, no doubt shooting each other significant looks. For a father and daughter born universes apart, they have an uncanny understanding of each other.

Pete finally walks around to the boot, depositing the luggage and coming to sit in the front passenger seat. Rose settles wordlessly in the back.

“You’re short,” Pete says abruptly, turning his entire torso to face the Doctor as the Doctor pulls the sedan out of the service area and into traffic. “And your hair’s all wrong. But Rose says you haven’t regenerated?”

Leave it to Pete Tyler, blunt and to the point. In an entirely different way than his wife, of course, but they do share that trait in common.

“Some sort of de-aging mishap. Probably thanks to that alien tech in the trunk,” the Doctor replies, cutting off a cab and earning a loud honk as he swerves across two lanes to merge onto the expressway. “A good three hundred years or so, I’d guess, relatively early in my eighth incarnation.” He pauses. “We’re very lucky, actually.”

“Lucky?” Rose says from the back, and he can  _hear_ her rolling her eyes. If she was sitting any closer, she’d swat his arm again.

“If Rose had been the one in the path of that de-aging device, she would’ve vanished right out of existence. Regressed three hundred years, before you were even an egg in anyone’s ovary or a twinkle in anyone’s eye, right into a puff of dust and scattered atoms.”

The grim knowledge has been tickling at the back of his head, something he didn’t want to let himself ponder fully, because now isn’t the time for anger. Anger at himself, in particular, for being so reckless with that remote. He isn’t sure if it’s these different neurons, or simply the sort of personality he seems to have regressed into with this incarnation, but he’s actually  _quite_ furious with his tenth self for being so irresponsible. It’s one thing to be irresponsible in the thick of it when the situation calls for action, but  _not_ when he’s pretending to be a cowboy for the sake of seeing Rose Tyler laugh.

At some point, he’s going to have to sit down and give himself a talking-to about having care, about how the better part of valor is  _not_  interesting flashy lights or inane verbal puns.

Because while his personality and neurons have resorted to proper Eighth form, the fact that his entire existence is wrapped up with the woman in the backseat hasn’t changed a whit. If Rose had died because of his carelessness, he could  _never_  forgive himself, no matter which incarnation he was in.

 _I could save the world, but lose you._ It practically defines him, that mortal conundrum. Has done for years, ever since he first caught sight of that yellow hair and pink hoodie shining like a beacon in a dark basement.

Pete has pulled out his mobile and is murmuring something to someone on the other end about “containment teams” and “prepare a clean room,” and the Doctor would tell Pete not to bother, he can just use the normal lab, but he doubts it would do any good.

The silence from the backseat is deafening. 


	2. Chapter 2

~~~~~

It’s been two packets of crisps, a pot of coffee, five hours and 29 minutes since they entered the special containment lab at Torchwood, and Rose is no closer to having the Doctor she knows — the Doctor she  _recognizes_  — back than she was on the zeppelin. 

She watches the seconds tick by on her watch, a tiny, hopeful part of her hanging on to some vague idea that waiting five and a half hours — from an arbitrary start point, no less — is going to work again, going to return the Doctor, the proper,  _tall_  Doctor, back to her. 

Her eyes dart up, squinting at this Doctor as the count continues, running the numbers down in her head. 

_5 … 4 … 3 … 2 …_

Nothing.

There’s no use trying to stifle the sigh she lets out, because it escapes alongside a yawn, causing the Doctor to raise his head, bleary eyes focusing on her in the fluorescent lighting.

“My apologies, Rose,” he says. “You must be exhausted.”

She nods, too tired to argue, and the Doctor sets down the small tools he’d been using to poke and prod at the remote that caused this whole headache. 

“Are you close?” she asks, “Or should we try again in the morning?”

The Doctor takes in a slow breath, like he’s considering his answer, and that’s something, at least — a Doctor actually keen to think before he speaks. 

“I’m sorry to say I’m not much closer. Whatever system is controlling the de-aging capabilities of the unit is buried beneath mountains of junk software. I’ve only just started clearing it out.”

It’s not like it’s a surprise, that information. She’s nearly certain that whatever body he’s in, the Doctor is never the sort of bloke to hold back from boasting a bit over a triumph. 

“Well,” she says, “Five and a half hours here, some more on the zeppelin, and we’re — what — 300 years minus ten hours closer to reversing all this naturally?”

The Doctor smiles softly, no doubt calculating the remainder down to the nanosecond.

“How’s the patience on this body?” she asks. “You up for it?” 

He shakes his head, “I’m afraid that’s never been a particular strength of mine. I could do with some sleep as well, though, if it’s not a bother.”

Rods nods, joints cracking as she rises from the uncomfortable desk chair she’s been occupying, “Let’s go home then.”

She leads him out of the lab and back to the front offices, signing out use of a Torchwood car for the night before navigating to the garage. 

Her fingers clench around the keys as they reach the car, anticipating a move like earlier, where he’d insisted on driving, but instead he slides wordlessly into the passenger seat, head lolling forward on his neck as he settles.

“So’s this, like, regular tired,” she says, starting the car and pulling out of the garage and onto the dark streets. “Or some sort of side effect of the — the  _degeneration_?”

He licks his lips, eyes widening and closing a few times to fight off sleep before answering.

“Oh, it is hard to say, isn’t it? There’s never been anything quite like this before.”

Rose smiles, but it feels more like a grimace, “Yeah, you’re brilliant at that, aren’t you?”

His head tips back to lean against the seat, eyes slipping shut, “Seems so,” he murmurs, words drifting off into the sound of soft breathing.

He sleeps the rest of the drive home, and when Rose turns the car off after they arrive, he still doesn’t rouse, chest rising and falling slowly, deep in sleep.

She’s not had much of an opportunity to observe this Doctor, not without him looking back at her, something both familiar and foreign in the way he does. 

It’s not a bad body, this one he’s wearing, a bit pretty, but a different type of pretty than she’s used to, features somehow more classic, more gentle. 

Softer. 

Everything about him feels  _softer_. 

She places a hand on his shoulder, shaking him awake gently, and he blinks, focusing on her, as he swims back to coherence. 

“ _Rose_ ,” he breathes, and that, at least, makes her feel safe. There’s still something to his voice, still something to the way he says her name, and it’s enough to get her out of the car. 

“Come on,” she says, “We could both use some kip.”

The Doctor trails behind her through the building and she’s embarrassed to realize that she hadn’t noticed his steps before, the way he’s walking precariously, like he’s trying to keep from slipping right out of his shoes. 

“We’ll get you some new ones tomorrow,” she tells him as they reach the door to their flat, gesturing at his feet before fitting the key into the lock.

She shoulders the door open, the dim light from the single lamp they keep on a timer lighting the room. 

There, in front of them, is the sofa, and beyond it is the hallway to their bedroom. 

The Doctor looks like he’s prepared to settle himself on any horizontal surface he can find, swaying slightly on his feet with exhaustion, but she still feels like she ought to ask.

“Do you want me to take the sofa?”

[gallifreyburning](http://gallifreyburning.tumblr.com/):

He’d done that after he first came to this universe, slept in the living room while they figured each other out. That bit of restraint had broken in the back row of a movie theater one night, fumbling touches in the dark and quietly panted breath, until the judgmental stare of the elderly woman in front of them sent them dashing hand-in-hand into the darkness outside, giddy as if they were fleeing from a Scottish werewolf, running down rain-slick sidewalks back to their flat. The Doctor hasn’t slept on the couch since.

“Doctor.” It’s a statement, not a question.

He lifts one corner of his mouth, blue eyes sharpening as he regards her. “Rose.”

She drops her bag onto the floor and turns to face him. There had been brief moments of contact in the lab, elbows touching while they worked side-by-side, hips occasionally bumping, fingers flinching away from each other on equipment. Now, she purposefully lifts her hand and brushes curls back from his forehead, trails her fingers down to tuck them behind his ear.

The other corner of his mouth lifts, his cheeks creasing as he smiles at her.

“C’mon, let’s go to bed,” she says, hand dropping down to snag his, pinky and ring fingers hooked around each other and nothing more.

There’s a bizarre exhilaration in this moment, knowing this man is the Doctor, he’s _her_ Doctor, and still she’s pulling a complete stranger into the bedroom.

He’s being very conscientious, almost overly so. Ever careful not to push her when she’s hesitant, waiting on her cues. He lets go of her when she moves toward the bathroom to brush her teeth and wash her face, and waits until she’s finished, takes his own turn.

When she’s already curled up on her side of the bed, drifting off to sleep, he steps out wearing striped jimjam bottoms and nothing else.

Rose’s exhaustion has begun to reach the point where she feels tipsy, and if she was completely level-headed she’d probably pretend like she was already asleep while he climbed into bed. But she can’t help herself, staring at his bare chest, angles and hard lines defined in a way that his other body wasn’t. Well-proportioned yet compact, so vastly different than the Doctor whose long, skinny body she’s mapped every inch of over the last eight months.

He’s completely unselfconscious, stumbling in his tiredness until he collapses on his side of the mattress and mumbles, “G’night, Rose,” before pulling the duvet over himself and rolling onto his side.

Part of her wants to nestle right into his arms just like they do every night. It’s odd, being on her own side of the bed without any sort of contact. She falls asleep on her back, staring up at the ceiling, the Doctor’s new-old face in her peripheral vision.

~~~~~

The Doctor is swimming in a tropical forest, indigo-leaved trees and crystal water, twin suns beating down from overhead. The pond is hot, _too_ hot, it’s going to break into a boil at any moment. He really ought to get out, to climb onto the moist purple soil and catch his breath before he returns to his TARDIS.

He glances at the top of the nearby crest, and his hearts thunder in panic – the TARDIS isn’t there. It’s vanished, and he’s  _stranded_.

He wakes with a start, sweating under three layers of blankets, Rose curled up along his back.

[allrightfine](http://allrightfine.tumblr.com/):

The intimacy of the situation suddenly seems a little overwhelming, no doubt fueled by the remnants of the dream still clinging to him.

He’s not sure exactly how to address it though. It’s not that he’s uncomfortable, not beyond the sweat and slowly dissipating panic, it’s just — he has these memories, hundreds of them, of the times they’ve done this before, but they don’t belong to this body. Nothing matches up.

Her feet are brushing against his ankles instead the backs of his calves, her hand is flat against the skin of his chest, barely any hair there now to dull the sensation, he can feel some small part of the hair on his head pinned underneath her own on the pillow, nestled right up against him like she is.

It’s a bit like — there’s a trifle recipe he’s used in every body, but the process, the final product always ends up slightly different. And it’s that way now, all the same ingredients — a profound love for Rose Tyler, a dash of adventure, an impeccable sense of timing — mixed up into something new, something he’s never experienced before.

With a soft sigh, he moves slowly from Rose’s grasp, intending to use the loo before starting the day. The sun is coming up, he can tell by the way the room is beginning to brighten through the curtains, and he might as well get a jump on things.

He makes a stop at the walk-in closest and selects clothes for the day, brain reaching to remember outfits that seemed too small in his proper body. There’s a pair of trousers that always makes Rose tease him about an impending flood, and he grabs them along with a black t-shirt that’s usually just a little too snug. Pants and socks still fit like they should, and he nabs a set of each before moving into the en suite for a shower.

It’s easy to let his mind wander once he’s under the hot spray of the water, fingers mapping out the planes and angles of a body he literally hasn’t seen in centuries. He tries not to linger on what’s different below the belt, it seems crass, and anyway, there’s no guarantee Rose will ever even see this particular set of bits to have anything to compare.

The realization that he wants her to is a startling one, that even this body, as restrained as it feels, still reacts strongly to Rose Tyler.

He forces his mind back on track and finishes his shower quickly, toweling off and dressing with the same swift efficiency.

When he walks back into the bedroom, Rose is propped up against the pillows on their bed, thumb scrolling across the screen of her mobile phone.

She looks up and her eyes skate down his outfit, “There’s not going to be a flood after all,” she says, grinning as she nods at his trousers, the way the bottom hems are breaking correctly across the tops of his feet.

“That’s one crisis averted, then,” he says and returns the smile. “Ready to tackle another?”

Rose nods and pushes herself out of bed, slipping into the en suite as he steps out of the way.

An hour and a half later, he’s standing in his socks in the middle of Debenhams, waging an internal battle over the sort of shoes he’d like.

Rose is humoring him, surrounded by piles of boxes, loafers and boots and trainers, and he forgets for a moment that this isn’t an ordinary shopping trip. It’s nothing like a normal day for them, because he is not his normal self.

He’s nearly ready to write the entire thing off, spend the duration in his socks, or bare feet, even, when a familiar song begins on the store’s sound system.

Rose notices at the same time he does, the first few beats of “Tainted Love” rolling from the speakers.

“Let’s see ‘em,” Rose grins, tongue between her teeth, and whatever it is, whatever’s happened to make her slightly more at ease with him now, he’s grateful for it. “Show me this body’s moves.”

He can’t help it, his toes begin tapping, hips wiggling, and then he’s laughing and dancing with Rose Tyler in the middle of a shop, feeling nothing and everything like himself.

[gallifreyburning](http://gallifreyburning.tumblr.com/):

~~~~~

The Doctor is laughing – not the deep-throated sound he makes in his other body, usually tinged in a slight mania – but pitched slightly higher and utterly infectious. He snags her hip, the other hand grasping her hand, and they’re  _waltzing,_ one-two-three, one-two-three, halfway across the shoe section and back, he’s spinning her with expert aplomb, as elegantly as if they were in the Queen’s court.

Not that this universe’s Britain  _has_  a queen, but the Doctor would get the reference, if she could just manage to speak it aloud. As it is, she’s barely managing to breathe.

He’s grinning, and normally when they’re dancing close like this she’s got her head against his chest or shoulder, but now his face is startlingly close, because he’s at least five inches shorter. His hands are warm and soft, his eyes locked to hers as he counts steps under his breath (more for her benefit than his own, she’s certain), his thighs bumping hers at regular intervals.

Without warning he spins her in a full circle, and the world tips sideways as she’s dipped backward in a smooth and confident movement, her weight resting entirely in the Doctor’s arms.

“Those shoes seem to fit perfectly,” she says, breathless at how close his face is, at his surprising strength, at how she feels elegant simply because of the way he was moving with and around her. Her thigh is trapped between his, their stomachs pressed together as he holds her there, mid-dip.

“They do, don’t they!” he replies giddily.

For an eternal instant, he’s here,  _right here_ , breath warm across her mouth, and she can’t summon the self-control to look away from his gaze. She tips her chin forward a fraction, eyelids fluttering as she finally glances down at his mouth, the way his smile melts in the warm intimacy of the moment.

His lips move, pucker as though he’s about to say her name, and her mouth makes contact. Only the barest touch, his fingers digging into her hip and shoulderblade as he creates space between them again, enough so he can look at her, as though he’s asking permission.

“Rose? Rose  _Tyler_?”

The shrill voice snaps her right back into Debenhams. The Doctor lifts his face toward the sound, and Rose sees an upside-down woman standing beside the Jimmy Choos. The Doctor clears his throat and brings her upright, and she tugs her shirt down in a quick movement as she turns around and forces a smile to her face.

“Hey, Cheryl,” Rose says, trying not to blush. Of course the most gossipy woman from her mother’s bridge club would be shopping at this exact moment. “What are you doing here?”

“Just picking up some anti-aging cream,” she replies, rattling a minuscule paper bag with a cosmetic logo on the side. Her eyes slip right past Rose and settle on the Doctor. “I feel like I ought to be asking  _you_ what  _you’re_ doing here.”

“Oh, ahh, this is actually –”

“James Smith,” the Doctor says, stepping out and offering Cheryl a hand to shake. “John’s cousin. Just popped in for a quick visit.”

“Rose’s John is out, and you’re in, is that it?” Cheryl says, arching an eyebrow as she surveys him from head to toe. “Popping, and everything?”

The Doctor’s smile doesn’t falter. “Something like that.”

[allrightfine](http://allrightfine.tumblr.com/):

Cheryl’s fingers twitch, reaching for her purse, and no doubt her mobile, ready to share what she clearly thinks is news of some illicit affair when a man holding a large to-go cup of coffee joins her, resting a hand at the small of her back. 

“Ready to go, darling?” he says, and then catches sight of Rose and the Doctor. “Oh, Rose, didn’t see you there! And this must be James.”

Cheryl’s husband, Mike, is one of her dad’s most trusted advisors, one of the few that sits both on the Torchwood board, and the Vitex one. 

“You know about James?” Cheryl’s voice is almost disappointed, stripped of the glee of delivering juicy gossip, and Rose has always found it hilarious, that Cheryl never even knows half of the secrets that go on right in her own house. 

“Yes, this is James,” Rose says and the Doctor extends his hand for a shake. “I believe you were on the email this morning — the rundown of James’ temporary consultant status?”

Mike nods as the Doctor looks at her with his eyebrows raised — news has clearly travelled faster than he anticipated. 

“Yes,” Mike says. “I do hope your time with us will be brief though, we’re all a bit fond of the Doctor, er, _John_.”

Rose and the Doctor laugh politely and then they’re making their goodbyes, pausing to scoop up the box for the shoes the Doctor has apparently decided on. 

“Rose,” the Doctor says, when they’ve made their way to the till, “How many people know about this?” He gestures at himself, the length of his body. 

“Doctor, you know how Torchwood is,” she tells him. “We can’t just have a strange man running around the classified labs. Dad sent an email this morning — all the higher ups have been briefed.”

From inside her bag, Rose’s mobile begins to ring and she grabs it, unsurprised to see her mum’s face staring up at her from the display. It looks like Cheryl thought she had something worth sharing after all. 

The Doctor catches sight of the display, “Does that include your mother?”

His tone is hard to decipher, as unused to this voice, this man, as she still is. Might be standard in each body though — an inherent distrust of people’s mums. 

“I don’t know,” Rose says. “But we’re about to find out.”

Rose connects the call, lifting the mobile to her ear as she digs for her credit card with her free hand, shoving it at the Doctor and pointing for him to pay for the shoes. 

“Hello?” Rose says. 

~~~~~

It’s hard to decipher the conversation Rose is having with her mother, especially as the sales clerk insists on asking him questions. 

“No, thank you, I would not like a gift receipt or a bag,” he tells her. “I’ll wear them out of the store.”

The woman takes her time running the credit card, as the Doctor strains to comprehend the squawking Jackie Tyler is doing on the other end of the line. It sounds — amused? Angry? He couldn’t say. 

When Rose disconnects, he’s finally completed his purchase, and he can’t help feeling anxious.

“Well?” He asks, and Rose smiles sheepishly. 

“She wants to meet you,” she says. 

“And you told her no, absolutely out of the question, we have hours and hours of work to do, yes?”

“Actually,” Rose says, and her eyes dart away from his. “It seems we’re meeting her for lunch.”

[gallifreyburning](http://gallifreyburning.tumblr.com/):

He stares at her. “Are we, now.”

“She’s meeting us at that restaurant we went to a few weeks ago, the one with the crunchy breadsticks you like.” Rose pauses to fiddle nervously with her mobile, amends, “Liked. Would you still, do you think?”

She’s trying to deflect. Frowning, he replies, “Dunno. I do remember having quite a fondness for pears in this body.”

“I’m sorry, Doctor, I tried to delay her – I really did. But it’s going to happen sooner or later, depending how long it takes to get you back to normal.”

“ _If_  I get back. Rose, I’m a Time Lord. This changing bodies business is fairly standard procedure. A few bits of human DNA floating around my genome don’t alter the fact that physical change like this, it’s something I’m familiar with. This me is just as _normal_ as the other bloke with the hair and the gob.” He shifts from one foot to another, finally says the thing that’s been on the tip of his tongue since he woke up this morning and shaved the angles of this different jaw. “We ought to acknowledge the possibility that this version of me could be here for longer than you’ve considered. Could be permanent.”

Rose goes rigid, her knuckles turning white around her mobile. Surveying his face, she reaches out her free hand to take his. “We’ll cross that bridge together, if we come to it. One crisis at a time, please, Doctor? My mum’s enough of a handful for the next hour. Then we can get back to Torchwood and that alien remote. Okay?”

This time, when he squeezes her hand, she squeezes back.

Jackie is already sitting in a booth in the back of the restaurant when they arrive. Her jaw drops when she catches sight of them, eyes roaming up and down the Doctor in a way that makes him feel like he needs another shower.

“Oh my lord,” Jackie hisses at Rose when they sit down, as the waiter hands them their menus. Waiting until he’s gone, her eyes still surveying the Doctor like he’s some sort of peacock in a zoo exhibit, she says, “Are you sure this is really the Doctor?”

“Either that, or I picked up the wrong alien bloke off the baggage carousel when we landed,” Rose says. “I didn’t tag him properly before we left the States, sometimes there are mixups.”

“He looks like a young Errol Flynn!” Jackie blurts out.

It’s reflex, the way the Doctor grins at the compliment and unconsciously runs a hand through his curls. “I was his stunt double once! If you look closely at the most dangerous bits of  _Robin Hood,_ you can tell it’s me. Errol always resented the fact that I was better handling a sword, and the director preferred me to fill in during the fight scenes.”

“This universe doesn’t have a Robin Hood or an Errol Flynn,” Rose replies, grabbing a breadstick from the basket in the middle of the table and taking a huge bite, obviously trying not to roll her eyes.

“Really?” Jackie inhales, obviously delighted. “Is it true that he liked to pull out his …” she leans toward the Doctor, ignoring Rose completely, and drops her voice to a whisper: “his  _manly bit_ at parties?”

The Doctor’s grin broadens, and he leans forward, too. Picks up a breadstick, snaps off a piece and stuffs it into his mouth, instantly decides it tastes like cardboard, and spits it into his hand before leaning over to deposit it into a nearby potted plant. “During the wrap party for  _Robin Hood_ , he used it to play the piano, in front of the entire cast and crew.”

A groan comes from across the table, and the Doctor realizes that Rose has her face buried in her hands, her hair cascading across it like a curtain.

“Olivia de Havilland was prettier in person. Film never did her justice. And did I ever mention that the Wachowski brothers wrote  _The Matrix_ after a particularly eventful trip in the TARDIS,” the Doctor says to Jackie, nudging Rose’s foot under the table. 

[allrightfine](http://allrightfine.tumblr.com/):

~~~~~

The Doctor keeps it up with the name-dropping and the flashy party stories all through lunch — long enough that Rose reverses any opinions she’d formed about the lack of a gob on this model. 

He’s got just as much of a gob, only it’s running on a different setting. 

Her mum being completely enchanted though, that’s new. And not half annoying. 

At least with the other one there was some sense of urgency, a force driving him to get out of the situation as soon as possible — now, though, he seems content to spend the afternoon here, even after the dessert plates have been cleared.

"Really," Rose finally says, "If you’ve been one to inaugural ball, haven’t you been to them all?"

Her mum and the Doctor look at her in wide-eyed tandem and, oh,  _oh_ , that is  _weird_. 

"I’m just saying, Lincoln, Kennedy, dancing, America, all sounds brilliant, and I’d love to hear about it — really I would — but don’t you think we should be, you know,  _going_? Maybe take a look at the thing? To change you back?” Rose waves her hand in the air, trying to pantomime the shape of the remote.

"I do suppose we should have another look," the Doctor says, and then shifts back to Rose’s mum. "Jackie, it’s been an absolute pleasure."

Her mum beams at him, smiling widely, “Don’t go rushing into changing back now,” she tells him, and then turns to look at Rose, “Wouldn’t mind having this one for a son-in-law.”

"Mum!"

"I just think you should give it some thought, sweetheart."

Rose can’t get out of the restaurant fast enough. 

It’s nearly seven hours later, back in the Torchwood lab, that they finally get a chance to eat again, and if lunch had been an effusive affair, this is nearly the opposite. 

The Doctor is hunched over the tabletop, a slice of pizza lying half-eaten on a plate next to him. It’s not dainty the way he’s eating it, she’s not going to call it  _dainty_  (it’s a little dainty), and he’s barely spoken a handful of words to her, outside common courtesy, in ages. Even his frustrated noises sound polite. 

"Have you found anything?" she asks, tearing her pizza crust into small pieces for lack of anything better to do with her hands. It’s hard when there’s only one tiny piece of tech to work on at a time, and this has always been much more the Doctor’s area of her expertise than her own, regardless of how far she’s come since 19.  

"It’s got something to do with biosignatures," he tells her. "Only in my case, the man I was in this body, and the body I am now this man in, have obvious biological differences." He gestures vaguely to the right side of his chest, to the absence of a second heart. "Do you understand?"

She squints at him, the sentence  _sort_  of makes sense, but she’s not exactly sure how it relates to  _fixing_  all of this.

He shakes his head, “Let’s look at it this way — think about my fashion sense. How often  _I’ll_ think that a small bit of blue that two articles of clothing have in common means that they match. And  _you_  think that, regardless of color, mixing flower prints and plaid prints is too much of a contrast to be worn together. This,” he points at the remote, “is you. It doesn’t want to recognize any of the similarities, and therefore now won’t let me out of the flat wearing the other body. Every time I try, it powers down.”

Well, put that way, she definitely understands. Some of the things that other one wears, honestly. 

"And, so, I’ll need to find a way to pull the entire ensemble together," he says. "An accessory, if you will, that completes the look. Something to filter the signal through and convince it that it’s all right, that the other body  _matches_.”

Rose nods, “All right, where do we find this accessory? I’m guessing it’s not something we can get back at Debenhams — what do we need?”

His eyes glance away from hers briefly — that’s never good.

"We need another heart, Rose," he says. "Another _human-Time Lord metacrisis_  heart.”


	3. Chapter 3

Rose makes a noise, something halfway between  _ah-ha_ and  _huh_ that actually sounds like she’s choking. “We need another …  _you_?”

“Exactly,” the Doctor says, fiddling with the remote, careful not to press any buttons. “If I’m going to re-age myself into my tenth body, we’re going to have to cross a few timelines, pull another version of my tenth self from some point in this universe’s future or past. Bring him here.”

“Dangerous,” she says, not asking, because she hasn’t traveled with a Time Lord and hopped dimensions for years without picking up a sense for what should and shouldn’t be meddled with, temporally speaking.

“Always.” He taps his temple. “I’ve still got my time sense faculties, even with the metacrisis half thrown in, and even just considering this plan, they’re gonging just like the cloister bell.”

“The same atoms existing in the same space – but they aren’t the same atoms, are they? Different you, and all?”

“Not the same atoms, no. I can build a machine to navigate time-fields, to keep the web of time intact, that’s easy as pie. But the process of breaching the web in the first place, that’s the tricky part. The potentially  _boom_ -y part.”

“Firecracker boom, or nuclear bomb boom?” Rose asks.

“Supernova boom,” the Doctor replies.

Rose makes that choking noise again.

“But this is important,” he says, his gaze dropping to his hands, his eyebrows lifting. There’s a strange expression on his face. “So it’s worth the risk.”

It strikes her, then, that he means it’s important to  _her,_ so it’s worth the risk.

Because he thinks she doesn’t like this version of the Doctor. Maybe he thinks she doesn’t want this version of him, that the life he offered to spend with her, she might refuse it if it came in a different package. Which explains why, even though he’s obviously growing more comfortable in this skin by the hour, he’s been so quiet since lunch with her mum.

Oh, she’s mucked this up.

Rose comes to stand beside him, turning around and hopping up to sit on the lab table. She nudges his elbow with her thigh, and he looks at her sideways.

“If I recall, that’s explicitly forbidden in article four, paragraph sixteen of the Torchwood lab procedure manual.”

She snorts, snagging him by the bicep and drawing him over to stand so his waist is between her knees, and his eyes are nearly even with hers. “If I recall, you never cracked open the Torchwood lab procedure manual, you used it as a doorstop instead,” she says, reaching up to tuck a few curls behind his ear. Tracing the line of his cheeks with her thumbs, stroking across his brow and to the corner of his mouth. Heart hammering in her ears, she leans forward and presses her lips to the same spot, lingering there for a long moment, eyes closed as she absorbs the warmth radiating from his skin.

“I love you,” she says, quiet and sure. “This you, or short-haired-and-big-eared you, or skinny-with-the-gob-and-the-hair you. You’re my Doctor, no matter which face you happen to be wearing. I’m just afraid – I’ve been thinking – if this thing de-aged you three hundred years or so, does that mean you’ll live that long now? Did your single human life just have three hundred years injected into it?” Her forehead leans against his, and she slips her fingers into the curls at the nape of his neck, palms resting against his pulse points. “I’ll be lucky if I’ve got eighty more years left in this body of mine. What happens when you’re stranded here in this universe, without the TARDIS, all on your own? Three hundred years is a long time.”

[allrightfine](http://allrightfine.tumblr.com/):

~~~~~

He hasn’t got a good answer for that, in fact, it’s something he’s been trying very hard not to think about — a few, lonely extra centuries didn’t used to seem so frightening, but now, linear and half-human, the thought is downright terrifying.  

“I couldn’t say,” he tells her, because it seems like a time for honesty. “I think it’s a bit like — it’s BOB o’ clock.”

Rose smiles sadly, and nods, the skin of her forehead slipping against his own. It’s a game they play with Tony, reading the time on digital clocks as words instead of numbers — 8:08 becomes BOB, 5:05, an SOS cry, time perceived as something entirely different. 

A de-aged Time Lord, in a body with one heart — BOB o’ clock. 

“But getting me back in the other body, that should put it all to rights anyway,” he says. “So that’s what we’ll do.”

She brushes her nose against his, “I mean it, Doctor, it’s not the packaging that matters, you know?”

His relationship with Rose, the physical aspects of it, he suspects they’d have shaped up much differently if everything between them had begun in this body he’s in now. As it is, he’s left to follow Rose’s lead, left with a brain with a dog-eared script and muscles that are just reading it for the first time. 

He nudges her nose in return, “I know.”

She presses her lips to the corner of his mouth again, fingers tightening in his hair, angling his head. She’s positioning him for a better kiss — a proper kiss. His hands move to settle on her waist and for a moment he’s torn between the impulse to bring her closer and the impulse to push her away. 

Because if he gets a taste of her like this, if this body is allowed to complete the circuit it’s suddenly sparking to connect, he might not want to leave it behind after all, consequences be damned. 

He pulls back as far as he dares, but her lips are still hovering precariously close to his, and he  _wants_ , he wants so, so much. 

“If I were to come here, another me,” he says, voice soft, unwilling to disrupt the intimacy that’s settled between them. “Those events would already be in motion. I’d have to pick a moment and hop back in. And I think, Rose Tyler, if I know anything about that body I’m missing, I’d be aiming for this moment right here.”

Her eyes widen and he can tell he’s surprised her. 

“Why?”

His fingers tighten in the fabric of her shirt, “Because I’d be trying to stop what’s about to happen.”

She sounds breathless, “What’s about to happen?” But then her eyes are darting to his lips, and, oh, she knows. She always knows. 

“Let’s find out, shall we?” he says, and then he’s tipping back closer to her, mouth brushing against hers. 

She stiffens slightly at first, it’s unfamiliar even for him, and he’s still essentially the same man. He can’t imagine what it’s like for her, but then she relaxes into the kiss, lips softening as she maps his — this set, anyway — for the first time. 

It was far more than he’s usually comfortable with in this body, closing that final distance between them, and he’s content to follow her lead once more, nearly sighing with the feel of it all. 

Part of him is tense, waiting for his other self to appear, because it’s true — if he’s going to return to that body with the gob and the hair, he’s certainly not going to want to compete with whatever his eighth self may be able to bring to the table, but as Rose’s mouth opens against his, her tongue slipping out to brush his against his bottom lip, he finds the tension melting away. 

He parts his lips further, letting her tongue move to slide against his own, and she winds her arms tighter around his neck, pulling him in closer to the space between her legs. His own hands skate from her waist to wrap around her back and he forgets he’d even been hesitant in the first place. 

[gallifreyburning](http://gallifreyburning.tumblr.com/):

Their movements are slow, exploratory. Her fingers press against his shoulders, heels against the back of his knees as she eliminates any distance between them. His entire torso is arched toward her, pressing her backward as he sucks on her top lip.

The angles are all wrong – different in this body; the way her nails scrape his skin through his shirt is familiar and at the same time breathtakingly new. His nerve endings are alight, unaccustomed to touching and being touched like this; this brain is processing familiar sensations through entirely new neurons. This is Rose as he’s always and never known her, arching against him and wrapping her legs tighter around his hips.

There’s something about the idea of making love to Rose Tyler with a different body that makes him breathless and desperate. He’d wasted the opportunity as his ninth self, never shown her how much he needed and wanted her, not like this. Every version of him, from first to last, so wrapped up in this woman who has saved him in every possible way. He’s burned up stars for her sake, died to keep her safe, placed every scrap of his faith in her hands, given up the whole of time and space because he doesn’t need it, not if the very purpose of his existence is here, folded into his arms, clinging to him and licking her name from his mouth.

 _Skin_ , he needs more skin, needs to test how sensitive these taste buds are on every inch of her – he leans her further backward, tracing down the line of her neck with his tongue, kissing along her collarbones. Supporting her weight with one arm, he uses the opposite hand to fumble at the buttons on her blouse until the first four pop open, revealing a pink bra. Her legs wrap the rest of the way around his hips, her fingers clutching at his hair, as he licks down her chest to the rounded swell of her left breast, encased in satin.

“Home,” she gasps, tugging at the back of his hair. The gentle pain sears out his ability to think rationally and he’s climbing onto the lab table, equipment clattering to the floor, desperate for more warm friction. _God, home, yes, this is home, always and forever._

Her body shakes – she’s giggling – and she kisses the top of his head as he takes a satin-covered breast into his mouth, tongue dampening the fabric, the nipple underneath hardening between his teeth.

“Doctor,” she says, and he’s certain it’s meant to be authoritative, but the edge of desperation is undeniable. “We should go home – do this properly, somewhere Pete isn’t likely to pop in to check on our progress with the alien tech.”

“I’m only being practical,” the Doctor replies, looking up at her through his eyelashes as he kisses down the curve of one breast, lapping at the dip between, and making his way up the other one. “The flat’s fifteen minutes away. The lab table is right here, and if you give me precisely seventy-three seconds, I can jam the lock on the door so no one bothers us.”

Rose’s eyebrow arches, the corners of her mouth lifting. Her tongue rests thoughtfully on her top lip. “All right, have it your way. One.”

The Doctor straightens from where he was bent over her body, leaving her sprawled across the lab table, propped up on her elbows. Her grin widens, her legs tightening around his waist. “Two.”

“Now, this is cheating,” he says, wiggling his hips in a vain effort to free himself. The friction against his erection, pinned inside his trousers, is delightful agony.

“Three.”

“Right, then. You’ve left me no choice. Rose, you’ve brought this on yourself.” He positions one arm in the small of her back, the other under her arse, and lifts her right off the table. She lets out a delighted squeal and wraps her arms around his neck as he carries her across the room to the security keypad beside the door.

“Four,” she breathes against his cheek. Her tongue finds his ear, tracing the shell of it as he props her up against the wall and tries to concentrate on the keypad.

She only makes it to twenty-four, and he’s only half finished programming the lock, when it happens.

[allrightfine](http://allrightfine.tumblr.com/):

He can feel it along the back of his neck, hot pinpricks that have less to do with Rose’s nails than he’d like, and in the way the very air itself is charging up around them.

Rose notices his delay and shifts against him, her hair clinging to the wall with the blanket of static energy that’s rapidly descending.

“Doctor?”

His hand falls from the keypad, disappointed, “It’s going to be both of us soon,” he says. “Both Doctors,” and he drops his head into the curve of her neck, lips brushing the skin.

There’s a metaphor here, a larger meaning to the way her hips are angled perfectly against his, but for the fabric of their clothes, close but not close enough, fast but not fast enough.

“How soon?” she asks. “Seconds? Or minutes?”

She wiggles down pointedly against him and he groans softly with the motion, her arms tightening around his neck as she does it again.

“Soon,” he can barely get the word out, lips opening and closing uselessly against her collarbone.

“ _Focus_ , Doctor,” she says. “How. Soon.”

He moves the hand he’d had on the keypad to support under her bum, fingers sliding into the back pocket of her jeans. Closer, closer.

“Five minutes, at the very, very most,” he finally manages. “Rose, we have to stop.”

With no shortage of regret, he moves his hands away, slowly, making sure Rose can find her feet as he sets her back down.

He pulls back with a shuddering breath, “Perhaps it’s better this way,” he says.

She ducks down, catching his eyes where they’re trained on the floor, the shoes he hasn’t even had a chance to break in yet.

“Five minutes that you’re _wasting_ ,” she admonishes, undercutting the words with a grin.

“How are your nerve endings?” she asks. “New? Or did they come broken in?”

Her fingers find the buckle of his belt, toying with it.

“Rose?”

She slips the leather free of the clasp and, oh, her grin now, that’s practically sinful.

“Remember when you first got here?” she asks, “The other you? All new and —” her hand slips down, cupping him through his trousers, “— _sensitive_?”

She works the button at his waistband free, the tips of her fingers dancing along his zip, before that, too, is undone, and her hand is slipping over his boxer briefs, a pair he distinctly remembers her having removed before, when he wore a body that preferred them.

She traces the outline of his erection through the thin cotton, “You were new and sensitive and quick —”

He rears back, arousal and embarrassment warring within him, “Rose! I thought we were never going to speak of that again! You said — you said it was fine!”

She smiles at him, stilling her hand briefly, “I did,” she confirms. “It was fine then, and it would be fine now. Four minutes left, Doctor. You up for it?”

The ridiculousness of that question, when he is very clearly _up_ for a great many things, right under her palm, isn’t lost on him. And he might be able to — maybe he could — no, no.

“Even if I were, Rose, that’s hardly enough time for you to —” he gestures at her, hand moving up and down in the air.

In one fluid movement, she grabs his biceps, turning them so it’s him that’s pinned against the wall.

“It doesn’t have to be about me,” she says, and then she’s shifting, sinking to her knees in front of him, the edges of his vision blotting out so it’s all he can focus on.

“Let me do this,” she says, fingers curling into the elastic waistband of his pants. “Let me have this,” she navigates the cotton around his erection, shifting it and his trousers to his knees.

Her mouth is hovering, breath ghosting over sensitive skin, and she’s looking up at him with those eyes of hers, brown and perfect and waiting for permission.

She drops a light kiss to the tip of his erection and he can’t help the strangled sound he makes.

“You don’t have to —” he says, trying one more time.

She shakes her head, “I _want_ to,” and then she descends, mouth engulfing him, hot and wet, and yes, yes, yes, he can be quick, he can be so very quick.

Without preamble, she sets up a rhythm, a fast, slightly rough thing that he recognizes from his other body. It’s not the one this body would prefer, but there’s no time for that, no time to gently shift her movements, no time to whisper how good it feels, how lovely she is, what the sight of her, like this, does to him.

There’s only the energy in the air, the way it’s heightening the feeling, and he’ll be close soon, and he  — the other him — is close, too, molecules shifting, everything buzzing, and Rose’s hand rising, tightening on the base of his erection as her mouth works furiously against the rest of it.

His head tips back to the wall, eyes slamming shut, but no, no, he wants to see this, wants these eyes to have this memory, and he’s wrenching them back open, fingers gathering her hair in his fists, an unobstructed view of the way he’s disappearing between her lips, over and over and over.

He can’t hold on, not much longer at all, his hands tangling further in her hair as he becomes unable to stop the shallow movements of his hips. Rose encourages him, pleased little noises hummed against his skin, and it’s sloppy and wet and tight and, oh, right there.

 _Right_.

 **There**.

He comes with a moan, unable to smother it as it falls from his lips, chest heaving, heart pounding as his orgasm sings through his veins.

Rose slows her movements, light, soft, sucks that feel like too much, and then she’s pulling back to grin at him, running the back of her hand across her mouth.

There’s a loud, angry thump on the door next to them, shaking the wall where he’s still propped against it, and then a voice they both recognize echoes through it.

“Finally!”

[gallifreyburning](http://gallifreyburning.tumblr.com/):

~~~~~

Rose barely manages to keep from flinching in surprise. Even while she’s flooded with relief and excitement at hearing that voice again, there’s a trickle of guilt to go along with it. Cheeks turning hot with blood, she tries to smother it, to drown it, because it’s a very human reaction, and she’s well aware that there are no human mores that apply to this particular situation – giving one’s alien partner a blowjob while another version of him, from the future and wearing a different face, stands just outside the door.

Dear Deidre certainly never wrote a column covering the etiquette in this sort of dilemma.

So really, there’s no need to be embarrassed.

Face still hot, Rose snags the trousers from this Doctor’s ankles and lifts them up to his thighs. He grins at her, half-lazy and half-cheeky with satisfaction, and in turn holds out a hand to help her to her feet.

He’s just finished buttoning his trousers and she’s half-done with her blouse when the lab door makes a popping sound and slides open. Lanky, hair carefully coiffed into a messy tangle, wearing jeans and a grey t-shirt and his tenth body, the Doctor steps into the room.

Her heart does a flip – it always does, when she sees him after it’s been more than a day. There’s a muscle-memory from that moment when they spotted each other down the long, dark street on an Earth on the wrong side of the galaxy, with Donna and that blue box beside him. The sheer joy on his face, the ridiculous flailing of his limbs as he barreled down the street toward her at top speed, the way it wasn’t just her stomach that did the flip that time, it was like her soul somersaulted.

With a squeak, she propels herself into his arms. Her feet leave the ground and he swings her around, laughing.

“I just left you half a minute ago, Rose Tyler,” he says, name rolling off his tongue like he’s tasting something delectable, and it sends a thrill straight to the base of her spine. “Well-l-l-l, future you. Tomorrow you.”

He sets her back on her feet, and she steps back. “Glad to see you.”

“I was here the whole time,” he says, glancing at his other self.

The other Doctor is standing stiffly, as though he’s trying not to rise up onto his toes to compensate for the height difference.

“I know,” Rose says quickly, lacing her arm with the shorter Doctor’s and leaning her head on his shoulder. “We’ve been getting on just fine.”

“I’m quite sure he remembers,” the shorter Doctor says dryly.

“Aimed for five minutes earlier, but the timeline didn’t like that bit of jiggery-pokery,” the taller Doctor says, mouth flattening as he studies his other self.

“Fixed point in time.” The shorter Doctor grins smugly.

Rose draws back to look at him in shock. “No! Really?”

“No,” the taller Doctor confirms, crossing his arms. “Don’t get us wrong, Rose, your fellatio skills are universe-altering. But not to the extent they would cause a fixed event.”

The shorter Doctor shrugs. “Could’ve fooled me.”

“Really, though. Only a single deadlock on this door?” the taller Doctor says, lifting an eyebrow at his earlier counterpart. “The lowest-paid Torchwood rent-a-cop could’ve worked his way through that.”

“I’m sure you recall, I was a bit preoccupied,” the Doctor retorts, arm sliding around Rose’s waist. “Given the other thirty-three seconds, I’d have had a hexa-binate quantum deadlock finished.”

“It was a deca-binate quantum deadlock you were aiming for.” The Doctor taps his temple. “I remember quite clearly.”

“If I were less of a gentleman, I’d bring up some  _other_ numbers I remember quite clearly.”

“I can’t believe you passed up the velvet jacket at Debenhams, what profound self-restraint you showed. Must’ve been itching to put it on, and find a white scarf in the women’s department to use as a cravat. Didn’t want to let Rose know exactly what a fashion disaster you were in that eighth incarnation?”

“Fourteen and three-quarters seconds longer, the first time around! That’s how much longer!”

“Doctor!” Rose interrupts sternly, holding one hand out toward each of them in a  _stop_ gesture, and both of their jaws click shut in tandem.

[allrightfine](http://allrightfine.tumblr.com/):

The taller Doctor’s eyes dart away, landing on the remote still lying on the tabletop. He moves toward it, ducking down obnoxiously low as he passes the shorter man, stooping to be heard.

“At least I returned the favor when I was finished,” he says, voice quiet, but not anywhere near quiet enough for Rose to miss it.

“Oi!” She wheels on him, “I’m apparently going to be seeing _you_ tomorrow, and if you keep it up, no one’s going to be doing anyone any favors. Play nice.”

He grins at her, all wide eyes and innocent tone, “I was only going to say that I probably finished that quite a bit quicker than he could manage, as well. No tongue dexterity, that body.”

He clicks the tongue in question at Rose, winking. 

Rose rolls her eyes, “Oh, I don’t know, seemed dexterous enough when he was snogging me. Maybe I ought to test it again, find out for myself.”

The younger Doctor makes a giddy noise, somewhere in the vicinity of a giggle. 

“All right, that’s enough, I’m serious,” Rose says. “It can’t be safe, both of you being here for very long. Do you know what you need to do?”

Both men nod.

“We’re going to need an amplifier, something to push the signal through both of us,” the Doctor in Chucks says. “There’s one in the vault.”

Rose gestures at the open door, “Go get it, let’s get this taken care of.”

There’s a squeak as his trainers scuff against the floor, “I can’t.”

She shakes her head, “What do you mean you _can’t_?”

The younger Doctor laughs again, “I remember! You can’t go in the vault anymore! Special facial recognition, installed just for you!”

Rose can’t keep the surprise, or the accusation, from her voice, “What? When did they do that? Doctor, what did you do?”

The taller man points, gesturing wildly at his counterpart, “He did it, too! He’s me!”

“I did,” he agrees. “But I can still get in the vault,” he points at his face, the one apparently not yet in Torchwood’s security archives, and smiles widely. Then he’s turning to the door and striding through it, the clack of his shoes on the tile growing softer as he makes his way down the hall.  

“Doctor…” She turns to the one left in the room with her. 

“Rose, listen, you said — you did! — that you like how fast the microwave is now,” the Doctor stammers. “And that kind of technology just isn’t available in this time period. I did it for _you_ , Rose.”

Rose reaches forward, snagging his t-shirt between her fingers and reeling him toward her, “When we get back home, you are going to make me something _delicious_ in that microwave.”

His eyes widen, “You’re not mad?”

She laughs and winds her arms around his neck, rising on her toes in a way that isn’t as immediately familiar as it usually is, “I didn’t say I wasn’t mad. But I need you focused — the other Doctor, he told me how dangerous all this is. I appreciate it, what the two of you are doing.”

The Doctor sets his hands on the curve of her waist, fingers curling into her blouse as he drops his head closer to hers.

“It’s fine, it’ll be fine,” he tells her, pressing a kiss to the tip of her nose. “Now, you know what would _really_ help me focus?”

She bites her lip, cocking her head as she pretends to think it over, “Showing off that tongue dexterity?”

He grins, nodding in agreement, “Showing off that tongue dexterity.” 

His lips meet hers swiftly, backing her up to the same patch of wall she’d been pressed against earlier, deepening the kiss as the sound of the other Doctor’s shoes in the corridor returns.

[gallifreyburning](http://gallifreyburning.tumblr.com/):

Rose raises her hands to the Doctor’s shoulders, nudging him back, and he steps away as the other Doctor enters the room. Holding a jumbled mess of wires with a metal sphere in the center, he stops to stare at them, tilting his head thoughtfully.

The taller Doctor, still standing in front of Rose, smacks his lips. “Mmm, interesting.”

“If you’re going to describe it as ‘oaky’ or ‘fruity’ or somesuch, there’s no need to be crass,” the other Doctor replies with a roll of his eyes. “We’re wasting time.”

The taller Doctor gives Rose a wink, just as it’s beginning to dawn on her what exactly they’re talking about. He watches her mouth drop open before whirling around to join his counterpart at the workbench, both of them settling on long-legged stools. One Doctor pulls out his brainy specs (necessary, in this half-human incarnation, a bit of nearsightedness that he simply couldn’t fix any more than he could control the growth rate of his hair anymore); the other smirks at him and goes to work dissecting a tiny component of the remote without even a squint.

Part of Rose – the proactive, build-a-dimension-cannon part – feels like she ought to wade right in next to them, find something to help with. She’s got a decent head for tech, even though it isn’t her specialty; they’d probably have something for her to do.

But the better part of her just wants to stand here against this wall and watch. Two of them, the same man, and yet such a study in contrasts: curly hair on the right, spiky on the left; compact, and gangly; polite, and rude. They’re working in remarkable tandem, passing tools back and forth with only a few words, as though they can read each other’s thoughts. Which they might be – the Doctor retained a great deal of his telepathic abilities even with the metacrisis injection of human DNA. But Rose has a feeling that isn’t the case, as the tall Doctor silently offers a spanner to the shorter one, and the shorter one flips a screwdriver around to proffer the handle to his counterpart. It’s probably simply a matter of the same memories, same brain. They seem like they could spend hours like this, silently absorbed in engineering work, sharing space.

Rose is also fairly certain it’s the _only_ way they could share space for that long without things devolving into a shoving match.

Less than twenty minutes later, the curly-haired Doctor holds up a mass of electronics, now with the remote hard-wired in. “It’ll hardly win any blue ribbons for aesthetics, but it will get the job done.”

Rose comes to stand beside them. “That’s it, then?”

“Yep,” the taller Doctor says, popping the _p_. He pulls of his specs and tucks them into his pocket.

“Looks like a metal octopus.”

“The Miscreant Marquis of Happel Four has one of those for a pet — a metal octopus,” the shorter Doctor replies, giving her a half-smile. “He’s a nightmare at parties. And don’t even get me started on the octopus.”

“No really, don’t get him started,” the other Doctor quips.

“The Empress Dowager Tzu-hsi had me as a guest for three months, because she enjoyed my stories!”

“She had you as a guest in her _prison_ for exposing her favorite lute player as a Zorgon, and having him run out of court.”

“The Empress Dowager was quite the conversationalist, visited me nearly every day, and made sure I had the loveliest silk pillow to sleep on.”

“Give it here, then,” the taller Doctor says, snatching away the metal contraption and pulling down the neck of his t-shirt far enough to attach an electrode near his heart. “Are you ready?”

“Wait, now? _Right now_?” Rose says, taken aback – she ought to have known this would end soon, but she’d had vague thoughts of everyone going to dinner, or something. 

“Rose,” the shorter Doctor says, stepping over to take both of her hands into his own. His grip is warm and soft, and he bends his head down to kiss her knuckles. “Just a moment, and everything will be as it should.”

As soon as he straightens back up again, she throws her arms around his neck and holds him so tight he makes a squeaking noise. “I’m so glad I met you. This version of you,” she whispers into his ear.

His arms wrap around her torso, holding her close. She closes her eyes, tries to memorize the feel of this body, the angle of this jaw against the side of her head, the press of this chest against her own.

“Oi, you two!”

[allrightfine](http://allrightfine.tumblr.com/):

The Doctor steps out of Rose’s embrace with a final tight squeeze before shaking his head at the other Doctor.

“You’ll have her back to yourself soon enough,” he says, and Rose can’t keep her eyebrows from drawing together, the small frown that tightens her lips.

“I’ll still be there, Rose,” he says, shifting back to take her hand one last time. “I’m in there already, actually,” he gestures at the other Doctor’s head, “Probably completely appalled by the behavior of the body I’m in.”

The taller Doctor rolls his eyes, but laughs, “I’ve got you right here,” he points a finger at the back of his head, “Tied up in a corner with your own ascot.”

“Charming,” the shorter man says, dropping Rose’s hand as he reaches for the second electrode and positions it over his heart.

The Doctor that Rose will get to keep leans forward, flipping a series of tiny switches on the mass of wires.

“Everybody ready?”

The other Doctor and Rose nod, and he presses the final button.

Rose’s eyes had closed reflexively, unable to watch as this other man, this man she loves just the same, blinks out of existence, but at the complete silence that overtakes the room, she opens them again.

Both Doctors are still standing in front of her, shifting on their feet nervously.

“It seems we’ll need to complete the circuit,” the younger Doctor says.

“And since we shouldn’t touch…” The brown-haired Doctor continues on, eyes shifting to Rose, the arms she’s got wrapped around her abdomen.

Rose nods in understanding, stepping forward to grasp each of their hands, knitting their fingers together.

“I love you,” she doesn’t say it directly to either of them, but they both tighten their grip on her hands.

With a soft clearing of his throat, the taller Doctor reaches for the remote again, pressing the button once more.

This time it’s anything but silent, an electric buzzing that fills the room a split second before the sensation reaches her body. It feels like the very core of her is vibrating, each cell, each nerve, singing at a fever pitch.

Her eyes slam shut again as she tries to focus on the feel of the Doctors’ hands in hers, but she can’t parse it out, can’t feel anything but the static zipping through her.

The noise dulls slowly and Rose opens her eyes, focusing immediately to her left, the empty space there as she curls her hand into a fist.

“ _Rose_ ,” the Doctor says to her right, the word soft and on a breath, and then she’s spinning to face him, reaching up to wrap her arms around his neck.

He returns the embrace tightly, face buried in her hair as she rubs her nose into the soft material of his t-shirt.

“It worked, Rose,” he says, and he sounds so awed that she has to wonder if there was something they weren’t telling her.

“Was there any doubt?” She shifts back to see his face, eyebrows raising.

“Well,” his hand drops from her waist, darting right back up to scratch at the back of his head. “Not _doubt_ , exactly, but…there were some…variables.”

He shifts back and catches her gaze, “He could’ve stayed. Could’ve forced the current back the other way, and I’d be him, all this, folded up in that tiny, little package for good.”

Rose closes her eyes, trying to imagine that. It would’ve been all right, it really would have, but there’s a part of her that’s still profoundly grateful to not have to cross that bridge.

Still, no harm in teasing him a bit, now that’s he’s back for good.

“He wasn’t _that_ tiny,” Rose says, tongue between her teeth on a grin, eyes lingering on the Doctor’s belt.

“Oi!”

Rose shoves at him lightly and he laughs, grabbing her hand and tugging her toward the door.

“Come on,” he says. “Let’s go home.”

[gallifreyburning](http://gallifreyburning.tumblr.com/):

It occurs to Rose, halfway to the flat, that the Doctor has already lived through this next twenty-four hours. Or however long until they go to Torchwood together, and the Doctor creates a time-travel device of some sort. And then he’s going to vanish, to go back in time and absorb his eighth self.

But he’s sitting right beside her now, this tenth Doctor from the future who is also now her present Doctor. He never returned to the future, and Rose’s future self – she’s alone.

Does that mean this little time loop will infinitely repeat itself, and the future version of herself, twenty-four hours from now, will never get the Doctor back?

As the logic slots into place, her throat starts to close up and she can’t breathe –  _what have they done? What has HE done?!_

“So what – what happens tomorrow?” she finally stutters, goosebumps covering her arms, icewater trickling through her veins.

He glances at her, throwing off a grin and a shrug as though Rose’s Doctor-less life isn’t flashing before her eyes. “Bit of fiddling with some devices you’re going to snag out of Torchwood’s level one security vault for me, and when my blood sugar dips you’re going to get us those sandwiches I love from the commissary – the turkey ones with cranberry relish and extra mayonnaise. I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but you leave half of your sandwich on the table while you go outside to have a chat with Pete, and I eat it. You’re quite put out. So I give you my crisps and soda.”

“No, Doctor – but when you use the vortex manipulator or whatever and vanish, when you leave me in the future – how do you come back? To me? In the future?”

“I never leave,” he replies, apparently genuinely puzzled by the train of logic she’s following. “And it isn’t a vortex manipulator, either.”

“But you go into the past!”

“Not exactly time travel, actually. Not in this case. It’s a bio-location locked temporal loop closure apparatus,” the Doctor says, still looking at her sideways. “Not precisely  _legal_  in this star system, either, or the next three. Causes a hell of a lot of feedback, if they’re used incorrectly. Although before anybody realized how dangerous they were, every intergalactic corner store had those things for sale, right next to the banana toffee. Can you imagine?”

In point of fact, Rose cannot.

He shrugs and shakes his head in judgmental puzzlement. “Dunno how one ended up in the Torchwood vaults. Pete seemed as baffled as anyone by the fact that it was there. A-a-a-a-anyway, a bio-location locked temporal loop closure apparatus creates and a temporal loop, fully sealed and without disruption on both ends. So there is, technically, a pair of us perpetually existing inside this closed twenty-four hour time period. Also, there is a pair of us who stand in a lab, watch me push a button on a very boring-looking device, shrug at how very anti-climactic it is, and then walk away together into the future.”

The flood of information is baffling. Rose gets it, she understands the general idea behind the entire process, but she has no idea how to feel about the idea of a version of herself and the Doctor, perpetually circling around this twenty-four hours and having this conversation over and over again into infinity.

“So, for all intents and purposes, once we flip the switch on that bio-location loop thingie, this version of us exits the loop?”

“Yep.” Popping that  _p_ sound again.

“I don’t want to know any more details, do I?”

“Nope.”

“Is there still lager in the fridge?”

“Absolutely.”

“Thank god.”

~~~~~

The flat isn’t dark. And it certainly isn’t empty. The Doctor is well aware of who is standing in his kitchen, wearing a Gucci tracksuit and making artichoke dip, right beside a large stack of classic movies. He knows because he’s lived this day before, the knowledge has always been in his head, circling around.

His brains is stretching to fit around the imperfect flow of time in this twenty-four period, like a record warped and shrunk and spinning lopsidedly. His time sense is jangling, it’s rather unpleasant, actually, somewhat akin to the human sensation of hearing something in the wrong musical key, clanging on loudly in his head.

He’s going to need lots of distraction between now and tomorrow.

He’s also certain of exactly the sort of distraction that would be preferable. And that it doesn’t involve watching black and white films with Jackie Tyler.

Rose walks into the flat first – he holds the door and everything, and she shoots him a speculative look, as though she’s wondering if there are some leftover bits of his eighth self lingering.

“Woo-hoo,” Jackie calls through the flat as soon as she hears them enter. Rose comes to such a quick halt, the Doctor bumps directly into her bum. Happy accident, just the sort of thing to kick off this distraction effort. Jackie’s voice gets louder as she walks into the foyer to meet them: “I brought the collected works of Beryl Quinn, I thought we’d start with  _The Swamp Fox_ –” The instant she steps into the room and spots the Doctor, her face falls directly into a scowl. “Oh.  _You_.”

“The feeling is mutual. Is that artichoke dip I smell?” the Doctor says cheerfully, planting a kiss on the crown of Rose’s head before he maneuvers around her and through the kitchen door.

He can feel Jackie’s stare follow him, and then she hisses at Rose, “Just had to go and meddle, I suppose? Just like your father, you are. Why can’t anyone in this family leave things well enough alone?”

“Pete’s going ahead with the swimming pool remodel, then?” Rose replies.

“Typical. Both of you, typical. Sometimes things don’t need fixing.” Jackie lets out a long-suffering sigh.

“Pete said he’d be leaving the office around seven-thirty. It’s just now seven-fifteen. If you’ve already got a sitter for Tony, and the movie night is a bust, you could swing by.”

“Suppose I could.” Jackie’s voice drops, but the Doctor hears her whisper anyway: “Are you sure this is the one you want?”

“He’s the Doctor, I’d want him no matter which face he’s wearing,” Rose replies quietly. “But this him – everything about him fits. Me, I mean.”

“All right. Just so long as you’re happy, Rose.”

Rose’s response is muffled in a hug: “I am, Mum.”

Jackie’s head peeks around the doorframe. “I’m off, Doctor. Enjoy the artichoke-pear gorgonzola dip.” With a wave and a flash of teeth, she leaves.

The Doctor freezes mid-chew, his mouth full of chips and dip. He remembers this interaction, hazy and warped as it is, but for some reason the bit about pears hadn’t stuck with him. Rose walks into the kitchen just in time to find him spitting the half-chewed mash into the sink and wiping his tongue with a towel as he sputters indignantly.

“She did that on purpose!”

“Of course she did,” Rose replies, scooping a chip-full and chewing it thoughtfully. “Oh, this is amazing!”

“It’s a travesty!” the Doctor retorts, except he’s still trying to swipe his tongue clean with the towel and it comes out more like  _Miff a maffesty!_ With a final  _bleh!,_ he continues, “Ruining artichokes and gorgonzola with pear, your mother is psychotic. There are entire planetary systems where mixing pears with other sorts of decent food is grounds for execution.”

“You just made that up,” Rose says around her second bite of dip. “I’m going to have to ask Mum for this recipe.”

“Oi, don’t you start!” The Doctor points at her accusatorily. “Maybe I made up the bit about the executions, but there are stiff jail sentences involved!”

“Public flogging with wet noodles?” She grins, tongue poking between her lips.

“They put you in stocks and let the local gwurf-hounds lick your toes until you exhaust yourself laughing and scream for mercy,” the Doctor says with a smirk, stalking across the kitchen, towel still in his hand.

Rose’s expression shifts into something softer as he stops in front of her, trapping her against the counter. “Doctor, I need you to know that I –”

“Ssh.” He holds up the towel. “Open wide.”

“What?”

“Tongue.”

Quirking an eyebrow at him, she obliges, opens her mouth and sticks out her tongue He dabs at it a few times, making a show of wiping off any traces of the dip, before leaning forward and licking it. He makes a smacking noise, squinting — he can still taste a hint of pear, but it’s a sacrifice he’s willing to make. Besides, her mouth isn’t the only part he intends on tasting.

“Good enough. Rose, if I recall correctly – and I always do – I happen to be in your debt. And I’m the sort of man who always repays those sorts of debts.”

She grins at him as she hops up to sit on the counter, opening her knees and snagging the front of his shirt to pull him close. “It went something like this, didn’t it?” she says, bringing her lips to hover in front of his, so warm and close he can feel the vibration of her words.

“And we end up against the wall,” he replies. “Except this time, you’ll be the one standing. Deal?”

If she manages to say anything in reply, it’s lost into his mouth as he leans her backward onto the counter. 


End file.
